COLUMN: Sharp insight after 64 years of cutting hair

Friday

Jan 18, 2013 at 2:00 AM

When you've been cutting hair, shaving whiskers and shooting the breeze with customers for 64 years in the same Main Street barbershop, you must have acquired some wisdom — besides knowing the muscles, bones and arteries of a head, or how to cut everything from a crew cut to a mohawk.

Steve Israel

When you've been cutting hair, shaving whiskers and shooting the breeze with customers for 64 years in the same Main Street barbershop, you must have acquired some wisdom — besides knowing the muscles, bones and arteries of a head, or how to cut everything from a crew cut to a mohawk.

So sure, Narrowsburg's Charlie Knapp, 83, who retired from barbering a few weeks ago, can tell you how this Delaware River hamlet with art galleries, antique shops and restaurants has changed since he started cutting hair in 1948. That's when Studebakers drove on a Main Street lined with grocery stores like A&P, families owned a few cows or chickens, and haircuts cost 35 cents.

But to hear how — and why — people have changed since he took over the western Sullivan County business from his dad, who started it in 1911, you should sit a spell with Knapp near the red-leather barber chair with built-in ashtrays made by Koken, the last American manufacturer of those chairs. Listen as he clears out his shop with the dusty model propeller planes, fighter jets and biplanes hanging overhead and a Rep. Ben Gilman campaign sponge in the drawer. Charlie Knapp's barbershop might be a thing of the past, but his words are as relevant as ever:

"Every one is so uptight today," he says. "Whether it's about the government, the economy, whatever."

Knapp, who also served on the Tusten Town Board for a total of some 30 years and is still a member of the Narrowsburg Fire Department, blames it on the almighty dollar.

"There's so much pressure to have money and get things," he says — particularly on young folks, who, he says, feel like they just have to have it all — "a house, appliances, computers."

Once upon a time, folks worked and worked to buy a house, he says. So you couldn't spend all your money at once.

No matter how much you made, you had to put some aside to save.

That's how you bought things.

And now?

"If you don't have the money, you just put it on your credit card," he says.

Maybe that's why the one thing that hasn't changed much in this hamlet with restaurants that now serve dishes like crispy skate and scallops canistrella is what Knapp charged for a haircut when he retired: $8 — a price that surely will retire with him.

When you ask Charlie Knapp why he kept his price so low all these years, you get another piece of wisdom we can all live by:

"I never believed in hosing anybody," he says.

"When you're done working, you can look yourself in the mirror, and say 'I tried to be fair.'"